21. That Anyone May Obtain the Gift of Fortitude in a High Degree, and What Things Hinder It, or Drive It Away. Now He Who Wishes to Possess This Gift Sublimely and Excellently Must Strive That He Be Above All Mortals in an Uplifted Mind and Directed in Interior Things. It Belongs to Spiritual Fortitude to Contemplate the Goodness of God, and to Shun Whatever Draws Away from It or Is Dissimilar to It ; and in the Same Way Constantly to Attribute to Almighty God Praise and Honour with Great Strenuousness and Heedfulness. He Who Has Been Admitted to the Palace of the Heavenly King Will Be Free to Attend to Divine Praises with Immense Desire. Desire Brings About a Wound and Languor of the Heart, and Engenders an Impatient Hunger. He Who Could Endure This Until God Should Apply a Remedy to the Wound, Would Be Leading a Truly Perfect and Excellent Life. to Be Possessed by a Certain Continual Hunger of Yielding to God Perfect and Entire Praise, Honour and Reverence, That I&, That the Man Himself Should Know That God Rules — I Know How to Set Forth and Express Nothing Better Than This-, Whereby He May Be Carried Forth Into Endless Blessedness. There Are Four Things Which Hinder and Disturb a Man in Spiritual Fortitude. I. to Seek for Strange Things, or to Grasp at Delights in a Mind at Ease. Ii. to Follow and Strive with Eagerness After Softness and Sweetness^ Which Are Ex Ternal Matters

III. To seek and follow after pleasure, whence arise many inconveniences and miseries and the lessening of the internal life.

IV. Finally to experience little hunger. Such indeed are very far from perfection ;

nor can they satisfy perfect justice, nor offer perfect justice.

There »re four other things which over throw, banish and snatch away Spiritual

Fortitude. That a man should be disturbed at heart and preoccupied, and that he should depend on worthless deeds v, robs him of inward devotion or an inner life. He who has never been admitted into the Palace of the King within knows not how to at tribute praises to God, because he is inflamed by no desire, and because neither inwardly nor outwardly has he received any wound of love, and suffers from the disease of envy. Those who have never suffered the hunger of affection or desire can never be cured or healed. Whosoever shall have read these things attentively will find that it has been sufficiently explained that the hungering after justice may be cast away.